Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes

Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes

Paterson, Mark

Paperback

PhilosophyLetters & EssaysLiterary Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1474405320
ISBN13: 9781474405324
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: Feb 29 2016
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.10 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

A literary, historical and philosophical discussion of attitudes to blindness by the sighted, and what the blind 'see'
Why has there been a persistent fascination by the sighted, including philosophers, poets and the public, in what the blind 'see'? Is the experience of being blind, as Descartes declared, like 'seeing with the hands'? What happens on the rare occasions when surgery allows previously blind people to see for the very first time? And how did evidence from early experimental surgery inform those philosophical debates about vision and touch? These questions and others were prompted by a question that the Irish scientist, Molyneux, asked an English philosopher, Locke, in 1688, but which was to have implications for British empiricism, French sensationism, and the beginnings of psychology that outlasted the long tail of the Enlightenment. Through an unfolding historical and philosophical narrative the book follows up responses to this question in Britain and France, and considers it as an early articulation of sensory substitution, the substitution of one sense (touch) for another (vision). This concept has influenced attitudes towards blindness, and technologies for the blind and vision impaired, to this day.

Also in

Philosophy

View All